Culture and Self: The Different “Gifts” Amerindians Receive from Catholics and Evangelicals

Author(s): Aparecida Vilaça

Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 55, No. S10, The Anthropology of Christianity: Unity,
Diversity, New Directions (December 2014), pp. S322-S332
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
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 S322 Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 10, December 2014

Culture and Self

The Different “Gifts” Amerindians Receive from
Catholics and Evangelicals

by Aparecida Vilaça

In this paper I discuss the continuity-versus-change dichotomy by comparing the actions of Catholic and funda-
mentalist Evangelical missionaries working simultaneously among a number of native Amazonian groups. While
Evangelical action shows strong continuity in its emphasis on the development of an inner self among the natives,
effectively constituting the seat of their relation with God, the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council
(1962–1965) has shifted emphasis away from transforming and civilizing the Indians toward preserving indigenous
culture. My interest here resides in analyzing how the natives experience these different perspectives and adapt them
to their own projects of continuity and change.

The history of Christianity has involved parallel and indis-
sociable processes of continuity and change (Cannel 2006;
Robbins 2007; Wood 1993) not just related to what it defines
as its outside, such as Judaism in post-second-century Chris-
tianity, but also internally through successive differentiations,
both large and small, among which we can highlight the Prot-
estant Reformation.
As studies in the anthropology of Christianity have shown,
in addition to the relevance of the historical moment we select
and the interlocutors we privilege, the emphasis on continuity
or change varies radically depending on the objects on which
we focus. Hence, for example, a people’s patterns of social
organization may remain the same after Christianization while
the moral system and ritual life may change radically.
As some authors have already pointed out, anthropologists
very often have difficulties analyzing in a satisfactory way the
relation between continuity and change intrinsic to any pro-
cess of Christianization. Faced with a religion that seems ex-
cessively familiar to them and motivated by the generalized
interest in the exotic characteristic of our discipline, they end
up privileging continuity, failing to take seriously the claims
made by their indigenous interlocutors concerning the radical
break represented by Christianity (Barker 1993, 2010; Meyer
1998; Robbins 2004, 2007, 2010). In some cases, the outcome
described is that of a hybrid culture where Christianity is
restricted to form and emptied of content.
Aparecida Vilaça is Associate Professor at the Programa de Pós-
Graduação em Antropologia Social, Museu Nacional of the
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Quinta da Boa Vista, São
Cristóvão, Rio de Janeiro 20940-040, Brazil [aparecida.vilaca
@terra.com.br]). This paper was submitted 4 XII 13, accepted 9 VII
14, and electronically published 19 XI 14.
In this paper I intend to explore the dichotomy between
continuity and change by focusing on the relation between
Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism, specifically on the
perspectives of the missionaries from each of these Christian
churches, and contrasting them with the perspective of the
Wari’, an indigenous group of around 3,000 people speaking
a Txapakura language and living in the southwest of Brazilian
Amazonia. The Wari’ are particularly interesting in terms of
this topic because they have lived from the start of the 1960s
with Catholic missionaries and with Evangelicals from the
New Tribes Mission (NTM).1
By comparing Wari’ ethnography with the ethnography of
other Amazonian peoples and also turning to other ethno-
graphic regions, I wish to show first that their initial rela-
tionship with Christianity was determined by the interest of
these peoples in alterity, their “openness to the Other” (Lévi-
Strauss 1992), which means that Christianization involved
from the start a clear mixture of change and continuity. But
there is a difference in how it is perceived: those indigenous
peoples who became Christian centuries ago tend to have
incorporated Christian ideas and rituals as part of their tra-
dition. For the new Christians, however, such as the Wari’
and various other Amazonian peoples, the conversion to
Christianity, especially Evangelicalism, is usually compre-
hended as change. This sense of a break with the past is
experienced, even though conversion occurs, in continuity
with traditional forms of cultural reproduction that involve
continuous transformations enabled by the appropriation of
items of external origin.
1. I emphasize that by referring here to Catholics and Evangelicals, I
am not discussing abstract groups but specific sets of missionaries who
have lived with the Wari’ for more than 50 years. While I venture a few
generalizations, I look to retain my focus on the ethnographic setting.

䉷 2014 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2014/55S10-0017$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/678118

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Vilaça Culture and Self
My lengthy research experience among the Wari’, spanning
30 years, has enabled me to analyze a change of another kind,
associated with a second phase of relations with Christianity
and related to the experiences of the second generation of
Christians (Cannell 2006; Maxwell 2007; Robbins 2004, 2007).
This is not a case of Christianity being incorporated as part
of tradition, because the Wari’ still emphasize the rupture
with the pagan culture, but of the transformation of indig-
enous notions of self and culture.
Although the choice of the notion of self to think about
change is immediately evident given the centrality of this
notion in anthropological studies of Christianity, from the
classic texts of Mauss (1999), Weber (1987), Dumont
(1983) and Leenhardt (1971 [1947]) to more recent works
(Robbins 2004), the choice of the concept of culture, less
obvious, requires some explanation. It constitutes a key
concept in the dispute between Catholic and Evangelical
missionaries working in Amazonia.2 The former perceive
their actions to be split into two radically different mo-
ments: a past phase marked by a “disdain” for indigenous
culture, and the present, after the Second Vatican Council
(1962–1965), involving “respect” for the culture and a con-
sequent investment in its “preservation” (Orta 2004). Like
the earlier Catholics, the Evangelicals are openly in favor
of promoting radical cultural changes among indigenous
peoples, although these are secondary to religious conver-
sion itself because they conceive the abandonment of “bad
customs” (Viveiros de Castro 1992, 2002) as a natural out-
come of faith in God and the consciousness of sin. Al-
though these differences are perceived by the actors them-
selves as radically opposite, we shall see that both
approaches to missionization possess clear underlying con-
tinuities with a conception of culture shared by past and
present-day Catholics and Evangelicals alike, a conception
that differs entirely from those of Amazonian Indians
themselves.3 While for missionaries as a whole, culture
comprises a set of traits that confer identity—a result of
human agency—culture for Amazonian Indians is an in-
nate attribute. By this I mean that diverse Amazonian
groups do not think of culture as a set of ideas and prac-
tices resulting from human action but as something that
always existed and that is shared by all kinds of beings.
2. As in other regions of the world, the Catholic presence among
indigenous peoples in Brazil and Latin America as a whole is much older
than the Protestant presence, dating from the arrival of the Jesuits in the
sixteenth century. The arrival of Protestants intending to work among
indigenous peoples dates from the start of the twentieth century. In terms
of Evangelicals, the work among indigenous groups is almost entirely
controlled by U.S.-based missions led by the Wycliffe Bible Translators/
Summer Institute of Linguistics (Stoll 1982) and the NTM.
3. It is worth noting the relatively low number of Pentecostal Evan-
gelicals working among Brazilian Indians, especially given the rapid
growth of these denominations in urban Brazil and indeed globally. For
a few exceptions, see Capiberibe (2007) on the Palikur, Wiik (2004) on
the Xokleng, Veiga (2004) on the Kaingang, and Vietta and Brand (2004)
and Pereira (2004) on the Guarani Kaiowá.
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S323
Moreover, this culture does not comprise a set of fixed
attributes but a base for an incessant process of differ-
entiation (see n. 13; also see Viveiros de Castro 1998; Wag-
ner 1975). Here, culture is immediately “acculturation”
(Carneiro da Cunha 2009:361; Viveiros de Castro 1998,
2002).
I shall conclude with some hypotheses concerning the ef-
fects of the introduction of this new notion of culture by the
Catholics, a notion that Carneiro da Cunha (2009) has called
“culture in quote marks,” and the analogies between these
effects and those stemming from the Evangelical emphasis on
the constitution of an inner self as the locus for an “intimate”
relation with God. We begin with an analysis of the simul-
taneous movements toward continuity and change involved
in the acceptance of the missionaries.
Becoming Other
In The Story of Lynx, a book describing the first encounters
between Indians and whites in the Americas, Lévi-Strauss
(1992) explored the indigenous interest in alterity through
the notion of an “openness to the Other.” Lévi-Strauss shows
us how the fateful consequences of these encounters were
largely determined by the distinct ways of conceiving and
responding to difference. While the Europeans valued identity
and were interested in the Indians because of their underlying
or potential similarity, which could be revealed through a
process of civilization or catechism, the indigenous interest
in the Europeans was based on completely different premises:
they liked precisely what was different about them.4 The per-
petuation of this opposition today is explicitly formulated by
the Yanomami shaman and leader, Davi Kopenawa.
[The whites] when asleep see in their dreams merely what
surrounds them during the day. . . . For sure, they possess
many antennae and radios in their towns, but these are used
solely to listen to themselves. . . . The words of the shamans
are different. They come from very far away and evoke
things unknown to common people.” (Kopenawa and Al-
bert 2010:497)
The first Brazilian letter written by Father Manuel da Nó-
brega illustrates the immediate fascination caused by the Eu-
ropeans, referring specifically to the Christian rituals.
They say that they want to be like us. . . . If they hear the
bells for mass, they come running, and whatever we do,
they do: they kneel, beat their chests, raise their hands to
the heavens; and one of their leaders is already learning to
read and taking lessons everyday with great diligence, and
in two days knew the entire alphabet, and we taught him
to bless, absorbing everything with a huge gusto. He says
4. As we know, the interest in the stranger is not exclusive to Am-
erindians. See Sahlins (1985), Rafael (1988), and Rutherford (2006) on
the Pacific region and Cannell (2006) for comments. See also Meyer
(1999) on Africa and Sahlins (2010) for a general model.
 S324
he wants to be a Christian. (Manuel da Nóbrega 1549:i, iii,
in Viveiros de Castro 2002:196)
This appropriation—which the missionaries attributed from
the outset to the lack of culture of the Indians, who did not
have “faith, law or king” (Viveiros de Castro 1992, 2002), as
well as to the attributes of truth and power intrinsic to Chris-
tianity (and their God)5—ended up thwarting any expectation
of rapid conversion because the Indians soon reverted to their
old practices. They were not adopting Christianity as a religion
or as a new culture, as the missionaries wished, but were
instead selecting some of its aspects as a means of reproducing
themselves in the traditional way.
For many native Amazonian groups, this reproduction oc-
curs through continuous transformations effected through the
appropriation of rites, songs, myths, names, ideas, and objects
from the outside, whether from enemies, animal spirits, or
whites. This explains the high value given to strangers, as
Taylor (1981) observed in her analysis of the Christianization
of the Jivaroan Achuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia: “A crucial
aspect of trade relations among the Achuar is the tremendous
value attached to goods from ‘outside’: . . . the more ‘exotic’
the more highly valued. Moreover, the prestige attributed to
‘foreignness’ applies equally to material and symbolic values”
(Taylor 1981:656).
The Wari’ emphasize the external origin of some of their
most central cultural practices, such as the production of
maize beer and the funeral song, which, through myth, they
attribute to the apprenticeship of a Wari’ girl during her time
spent living among an enemy group. The same occurs in
relation to Christianity, where they insist on emphasizing its
new and unusual quality, especially relating to divine creation.
As one woman told me, “Nobody knew before that God had
created everything. We joined the whites and came to know.
For the ancients, there was no explanation for why the animals
were here. The animals existed for no reason, they thought”
(Orowao Karaxu, personal communication).
Although not the case among the Wari’, as I noted above,
the exterior origin may be unmarked or even forgotten with
the passing of time. Among the Yanesha of Peruvian Ama-
zonia, for example, the Euro-American origin of some cultural
goods is contested, subverting the power relations of the
whites (Santos-Granero 2009). The case of the Guarani, whose
Christian influence dates back to the sixteenth-century Jesuit
missions, is particularly interesting. As Fausto (2007:82)
shows, the ideology of predation that organizes the thought
and action of the Tupi-Guarani groups was masked in this
case by an ideology of love centered on the figure of a sky-
dwelling creator with the Christian influence of this new con-
figuration unmarked by the Indians, who presented it as their
5. Thereby making them the opposite of the Chinese, with whom the
Jesuits would enter into contact shortly after (see Gernet 1982).
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 10, December 2014
own traditional “religion.”6 (See Hanson 1989 on the same
kind of forgetting among the Maori.)
Focused precisely on the relation with the outside, among
many Amazonian groups, shamanism made up the primary
means of appropriating the novelty represented by Christian-
ity. Writing about the Guarani of Paraguay, Chamorro com-
ments that in the mission of San Ignacio de Ipaumbucú,
centuries ago, the leader and shaman Miguel de Atiguaje,
described by Father Montoya as a “true minister of the de-
mon,” “pretended to be a priest” and
simulated celebrating mass. He placed some cloths over a
table and on them a manioc cake and a vase, heavily painted,
with maize wine and, speaking between his teeth, performed
many ceremonies, displayed the cake and the wine in the
same way as the priests, and finally ate and drank everything.
As a result his vassals revered him as though he were a
priest. (Montoya 1985:57, in Chamorro 1998:63)
The same occurred in other regions of America, as Lau-
grand (1997) has shown in his analysis of the Christian-
ization of the Inuit (Canada), whose shamans also appro-
priated attributes of the missionaries as a form of
differentiation and empowerment. The problem, it was
clear, was not one of belief (Pouillon 1993; Robbins 2007;
Vilaça 1997). The existence of the new divinities was not
questioned, and the focus was on learning how to interact
with them in order to obtain specific results, such as im-
mortality, understood as the end of illness and death (Viv-
eiros de Castro 1992, 2002). It should be stressed that this
appropriation was a two-way process, because the priests,
perceiving the power of the shamans, began to imitate
them, though not with the aim of achieving their own
transformation but that of the natives (Laugrand 1997).
Wagner’s (1975) formulation on the same type of diver-
gence in the ways of dealing with difference is of particular
interest here. According to Wagner (1975), the opposition
involves the distinction between conventionalizing and dif-
ferentiating cultures.
If Americans and other Westerns create the incidental world
by constantly trying to predict, rationalize and order it, then
tribal, religious and peasant peoples create their universe of
innate convention by constantly trying to change, readjust
and impinge upon it. Our concern is that of bringing things
into an ordered and consistent relation . . . and we call the
summation of our efforts Culture. Their concern might be
thought of as an effort to “knock the conventional off bal-
ance.” (87–88)
We can turn then to the equivocations involved in the en-
counter between these different relations to alterity deter-
6. According to a hypothesis suggested by Gow (1993), even the ay-
ahuasca ritual (based around consumption of the Banisteriopsis caapi
vine), closely associated with shamanism across an extensive area of west-
ern Amazonia and assumed to be traditionally indigenous, originated in
the region’s Christian missions.
Vilaça Culture and Self
mined by distinct notions of culture, humanity, and person-
hood. We begin with the Wari’.
Culture, Humanity, and the “Outer Self”
Just like many other Amazonian peoples, the Wari’ concept
of humanity is much broader than our (urban Euro-Amer-
ican) own, including diverse kinds of animals. The animals
see themselves as humans (wari), meaning that they live in
houses with their families, perform rituals, hunt, cook, and
above all are capable of acting as predators by perceiving the
Wari’ in the same way as they are perceived by the latter: as
prey to be killed. The difference in Wari’ and animal percep-
tions of the world results from their distinct bodies, consti-
tuted not only by substances but also by memory and affects.
Different bodies imply distinct worlds. This is a phenomenon
widespread in Amazonia, described by Viveiros de Castro
(1998) as Amerindian perspectivism, a “somatic multinatu-
ralism” in opposition to our “cultural relativism,” a system
of thought that conceives the existence of a single culture—
shared by Indians and animals alike—and multiple natures.
Thus, if both the jaguar and the Wari’ drink beer, what is
beer for the jaguar the Wari’ see as blood.
The consequence of falling prey to an animal is undesired
metamorphosis, a process that contrasts with the voluntary
alteration of shamans and killers, related, as we have seen, to
the controlled appropriation of the exterior. Perceived by the
Wari’ victims as illness, predation leads to the person’s trans-
formation into an animal, temporary when reversed by a
shamanic cure or definitive when death occurs: the person
began to see the animals as humans and to be seen by the
other Wari’ as an animal. Consequently, the subjectification
of the animals results in a constant fear of undesired trans-
formations, which primarily threaten their children. One of
the modes of resolving the problem is through the process
of making kin (Vilaça 2002a, 2005), which is a means of
stabilizing bodies, differentiating a collective human identity
out of a generalized humanity of which animals form part,
by sharing food, bodily substances, care, memories, and af-
fects. This amounts to a continuous investment, therefore,
that must necessarily be shared by everyone.
The body vitality attributed to the proper functioning of
the heart, the locus of thought and affects for the Wari’, was
traditionally conceived as a sign or a guarantee of nontrans-
formation, registering the person’s stability. People who are
without an appetite, lazy, and sad could be suffering from a
process of transformation that needed to be reversed. This
explains everyone’s constant monitoring of the signs of vi-
tality/morality in everyone else, especially close kin, which are
expressed not only in bodily form (fat, movement) but also
in speech and the capacity to listen. People in transformation
are unable to hear: they are deaf precisely because they hear
only the voices of others, who call these victims to join them.
Another important sign is refusing food, which reveals that
they are seeing the food of other beings as true food; mistaking
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S325
blood for beer, for example. There was nothing like a “self”
identity to be possessed because this identity was contextual,
produced on the basis of a relationship and determined from
the outside. In the words of Taylor (1996), “Subjectivity . . .
is primarily a matter of refraction: it takes its source in the
sense one has of others’ perceptions of self” (206; see Robbins,
Schieffelin, and Vilaça 2014 for a broader discussion).
The Wari’ Meet the Missionaries
At the start of the 1950s, the situation in the small town of
Guajará-Mirim in southwestern Amazonia was chaotic, with
the rubber bosses interested in Wari’ lands organizing armed
expeditions that killed entire villages. In revenge the Indians
would kill the whites (usually at a much smaller scale) and
eat them. As these enemies were associated with animal prey,
karawa, warfare could not be attributed to the desire for
revenge only; rather, it constituted part of the incessant efforts
of the Wari’ to stabilize themselves as humans.
However, the intensification of warfare placed the Wari’ in
a disadvantageous position: dying in large numbers, they had
effectively become the prey of the whites and decided to accept
contact with the pacification expeditions organized by the
Brazilian government with the aim of defusing the state of
war in the region. These expeditions included, albeit sepa-
rately, American missionaries from the NTM, recently arrived
in Brazil, and the Catholic Church, represented by a single
priest, Roberto Arruda, who later became a bishop.
Like the other contact expeditions undertaken during this
period, they all involved approaching the indigenous villages,
around which were left various kinds of presents, especially
metal tools and pans. A Wari’ group peacefully approached
the house of the Protestant missionaries for the first time in
1956 (Vilaça 2010).
The wealth of the whites, their apparent generosity, and
their quickly evident capacity to cure diseases—of extreme
importance during the epidemics that succeeded contact—
made the Wari’ immediately interested in them. The mimetic
behavior observed by the missionaries was in every aspect
similar to that described during the first encounters between
Tupi-Guarani groups and Jesuit missionaries, showing clearly
that they saw bodily transformation as the means to access
the perspective and powers of the enemies. In the words of
the NTM missionary, the late Royal Taylor,
when someone saw the Indians arriving, he would shout:
here come the Indians! They would run across the open
field. They took the clothing and dishes. So when they
caught sight of the Indians, they [the missionaries] ran to
gather up everything [their goods]. . . . The Indians, of their
own accord, wore clothing when they arrived at the post:
they liked to imitate the civilized. (Royal Taylor 1994, per-
sonal communication)
The impressions of the missionary Friedrich Scharf on the
occasion of his first visit to the Wari’ indicate the same: “While
 S326
we were on the river shore washing, the Indians were on the
bank watching us and trying to imitate our gestures” (F.
Scharf, unpublished manuscript, “Sim Deus é fiel: Um relato
de como Deus cumpriu as promessas dadas a mim”).
Soon after the first contacts, the Catholic and Evangelical
missionary activities began to diverge. The Evangelicals—by
collaborating closely with government agents, offering health
care to the Indians, and transporting government employees
to the city—were able to establish themselves definitively in
various areas of the Wari’ territory, with larger villages even-
tually forming around the missionaries’ houses. The Catho-
lics—diocesan priests linked to the prelacy of Guajará-
Mirim—were unable to maintain any close contact with the
Wari’ until they managed to establish an agricultural colony,
Sagarana, in 1965. Located outside the traditional territory,
this is where they took the sick being treated by the priests
as well as various orphans under the wardship of the prelacy.
While the Evangelicals lived alongside the traditional Wari’
family houses and strove to learn their language in order to
start the work of catechism as soon as possible, in the Catholic
village the aim was to transform the Indians into “citizens”
in a short time span. The emphasis was on changing customs
rather than religious proselytism; indeed, the priests never
resided there, and everything was left under the charge of a
young Bolivian, a lay officer appointed by the priests.
The Indians were forced to work full time on the large
plantations and in other enterprises, eating in the collective
refectory, always appearing clean and well dressed, and obey-
ing all orders (Von Graeve 1989). Dances, songs, and other
traditional manifestations as well as thefts and other misde-
meanors were disciplined with jets of cold water or more
severe punishments, including being sent to a “prison,” a hole
dug in the ground and sealed by a door locked from the
outside.
According to the Wari’, masses were held sporadically, and
only in Portuguese, when the priests visited. In contrast to
other ethnographic areas, especially where Jesuits, Capuchins,
and Salesians worked, the priests in contact with the Wari’
never learned their language.7
When after about five years, around 1970, the inhabitants
of Sagarana resumed contact with their kin from other vil-
lages, the latter already declared themselves converted, saying
that they “believed” (howa) in God. However, the Wari’ of
Sagarana showed no interest in Iri’ Jam, “true invisible spirit,”
the form in which “God” was translated in the Wari’ language
(among other reasons because of the difficulty in locating an
equivalent figure in the indigenous cosmology). What, then,
had interested the other Wari’?
7. Except for the late bishop D. Roberto Arruda, who had learned
some of the Wari’ language by the end of his life, when he decided to
live in Sagarana. On Catholic missionaries and indigenous languages, see
Taylor (1981) on the Ecuadorian Achuar, Durston (2007) on the Peruvian
Quechua, Orta (2004) on the Bolivian Aymara, and Rafael (1988) on the
Tagalogs of the Philippines.
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 10, December 2014
“They Were Not Innocents in the
Experience of Conversion”
According to both the missionaries and the Wari’ themselves,
their conversion to Christianity occurred in a “wave” around
1969, when groups of people went to the missionaries to say
that they believed (howa; to trust) in God.8 In the 1970s much
of the population attended church services and showed an
interest in every aspect of the missionaries’ teachings (in-
cluding literacy classes).
When asked directly what interested them about Chris-
tianity, the Evangelical Wari’ usually pick out two elements:
they were able to eat everything without becoming ill, and
the fights between affines were over because everyone began
to treat each other as brothers and sisters. Both are directly
related to solving the problem of unstable humanity because
they suggest the end of predation by animals and by affines,
who could act as enemies by killing them through sorcery.
We can begin with the former.
The possibility of preventing humanized animals from
preying on them, thereby causing death and undesired meta-
morphosis, was glimpsed by the Wari’ when they learned
about the history of creation narrated in the book of Genesis,
one of the first texts to be translated into their language. Even
today they are fascinated by this book and paste sections of
it on the walls of their churches.
Aside from the power of their numerous objects and the
effectiveness of their medicines, the missionaries offered the
Wari’ a new ontology in which animals appeared merely as
prey, lacking any capacity for agency. As in Genesis 1:28 (King
James Bible), “And God blessed them, and God said unto
them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and
subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that
moveth upon the earth.”
By objectifying animals, divine creation fixes the Wari’ in
the position of predators and therefore of humans. As one
man observed,
People used to avoid armadillos and coati. When we ap-
proached the whites, the believers told us to eat everything
because it was God who had made them. They didn’t cause
disease. Pregnant women ate armadillos, hawks. This animal
became a true bird (prey) for us. People ate electric eel and
nothing happened. Why? “I created the animals,” said God.
“Wow, so that’s how it is,” we said. (Paletó, personal com-
munication)
As I have tried to show elsewhere (Vilaça 2009), “conversion,”
as a change in worldview, had already been conceived by the
Wari’ in one of their myths. In the latter, the ancestors fed
only on lizards, because they saw all the other animals as
jaguars and fled from them in terror. It was a boy of enemy
origin, captured and adopted by the Wari’, who taught them
8. The expression “They were not innocents in the experience of con-
version” is taken from Gershon (2006:147).
Vilaça Culture and Self
to see the animals as they are seen today. By differentiating
them among themselves and from the jaguar, the Wari’ were
able to make them their prey. The similarity between the stray
aspect of the missionaries without families (who usually came
alone or as couples) and that of the captured boy as well as
the attitudes of the Wari’ toward both become vividly ap-
parent when we compare the myth to the Wari’ narratives on
the initial period of contact with the missionaries. In order
to share the new ontology, the Wari’ had to adopt the view-
point of the boy, or of the missionaries, by identifying their
own bodies with theirs through adoption, which involves care
and especially commensality.
Turning to the second advantage identified by the Wari’
with the conversion to Christianity, adopting the missionaries
as kin allowed them not only to share their view of creation
but also to become similar as children of God. The generalized
fraternity proposed by Christianity and performed in rites of
commensality enabled them to mitigate another aspect of
predation, namely, the harm caused by affines through fights
and sorcery. By eclipsing affinity, the Wari’ momentarily re-
lieved themselves of this danger (Vilaça 1997). Because it
involved kinship, Christianity was necessarily a collective ex-
perience (see Gow 2006), distant from the individual con-
versions expected by the missionaries.
Clearly things did not turn out quite as they wished. Not
only because the affines made up a necessary evil, as we know,
and every so often would revert to acting in an avaricious
and angry way, but also because the animals insisted on acting
like humans, now subjectivized by the devil, who entered their
bodies like the Biblical serpent (see Vilaça 2011). With the
fights between affines and the deaths caused by sorcery and
animal attacks, the Wari’ deconverted, “abandoning God” and
the Christian rituals, until another moment, especially when
they began to fear the end of the world and the possibility
of going to hell (where they would become eternal prey
roasted on open fires), when they once again converted. The
alternation between Christian and pagan phases, always col-
lective, characterized the Christian experience of the Wari’
until 2001, when a revival followed the September 11 attacks
in the United States, scenes of which they were able to watch
on the communal television. They became afraid that the
world would come to an end and that Jesus would come back
to take the saved with him, leaving non-Christians to the big
predators left on earth or taking them to hell. This movement
was limited to the villages with a long-term Protestant influ-
ence and did not affect the sole Catholic village. Since then,
churches have been built in all these villages, and a substantial
part of the Wari’ population declares itself Evangelical.
Evangelicalism: The Inner Self
It is important to emphasize that the Evangelical missionaries
shared with the Wari’ the idea of the concrete existence of
animal spirits, thereby reserving a captive place for them in
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S327
the Christian cosmology through the figure of the devil.9 In
his memoirs, the missionary F. Scharf (unpublished manu-
script, “Sim Deus é fiel: Um relato de como Deus cumpriu
as promessas dadas a mim”) describes at length the fears of
the Wari’: “Who could free them of these errors and fears?
Of those demons and malign spirits who forced them to live
in this way and to suffer?”
Like the Catholics before the Second Vatican Council, the
Evangelicals considered indigenous culture “to be an op-
pressive system that maintains the natives themselves in a
state of permanent spiritual terror” (Taylor 1981:66). In the
words of an NTM missionary, the author of the manual of
catechism that guides the work of these missionaries all over
the world, “There is just one historical and real religion, and
that is the religion of the Bible. . . . All the other religions
are false and the deceitful work of Satan” (McIlwain 2003:39;
also see Almeida 2002). In contrast to the Catholic view,
however, the native culture did not pose an obstacle to their
transformation, whether into citizens or into believers, be-
cause it was subsumed under faith, or under the relation with
God.
Conversing with me in 1994, the late NTM missionary
Royal Taylor made explicit the subsumption of “culture” un-
der “faith”: “We were not that interested in their development
in terms of civilization. What we wanted was to learn the
language so we could transmit the word of God” (Royal Tay-
lor, personal communication, 1994). On that occasion, Taylor
very clearly saw where the problem lay. Commenting on the
movements of deconversion of the Wari’, he concluded,
They were not converted in spirit but only in mental per-
suasion. Belief for them was just a change in their way of
life, but belief involves an intimate relationship with God,
which they had not known before. . . . However much I
explained that it is Christ’s spirit that brings salvation, they
still link salvation to their conduct. (Royal Taylor, personal
communication, 1994)
Taylor knew that what the Wari’ were missing was not just
“faith, law or king” but an inner self without which an “in-
timate” relation with God would be impossible.
Like his missionary colleagues, he also knew that for this
inner self to be constituted, the timeworn “technologies of
the self” (Foucault 1990; 1997; Robbins 2004) typical to Chris-
tian practice had to be introduced. Among the Wari’, these
included above all confession and literacy, which allowed di-
rect access to the divine word, as well as individualized com-
mercial exchanges with the missionaries themselves, and rites
of commensality, which reinforced the generalized consan-
guinity in quotidian life (see Vilaça 2012).
Along with the new rituals, the Wari’ adoption of the divine
perspective through the missionaries ended up reducing the
scope of those whom the Wari’ could see as human (see Vilaça
9. See Meyer (1999) on the notion of the devil among the African
Ewe.
 S328
2013). The “strength” of God led to the devil losing the ca-
pacity to subjectivize animals, meaning he began to act ex-
clusively in the moral sphere of the relations of affinity. Evil
no longer comes from outside (because the animals became
simple objects) and is associated exclusively with affines. The
shamans ceased to be active because their role lost its function.
This same kind of narrowing was identified by Leenhardt
(1971 [1947]), in Do Kamo, as essential to the Kanak un-
derstanding of Christianity, associating the rupture of “mythic
participation” with the emergence of the “psychological self.”
In his words, with Christianity the person “detaches itself
finally from the socio-mythic domain where it had been
trapped. . . . The psychological self that had been seen wan-
dering everywhere, far from the body, is finally fixed” (264).10
One of the visible effects of this process of interiorization
among the Wari’ is the transformation of the notion of heart,
which is in the process of becoming hypertrophized, inte-
riorized, and disconnected from the body as the necessary
locus for its expression. Following the Christian revival that
took place in 2001, the Wari’ began to use expressions then
unknown to me, such as “he knows with his own heart” to
refer to someone’s secret intimacy in situations that went
beyond the Christian context per se. The idea of the individ-
ual, which the Wari’ knew to be an indissociable part of the
Christian message by inventing a sky inhabited by people who
lived in individual houses without any contact with each other,
seems to have begun to come down to earth (Dumont 1983).
Let us examine the relation between this effect and the one
produced by Catholic action. This is represented by the mis-
sionaries as completely different from its Evangelical coun-
terpart.
Catholics: Guilty Culture
Following the Second Vatican Council, the work of the Cath-
olic Church underwent, from its own point of view, a radical
change in approach, beginning a “second” phase of “new
evangelization.” After conducting a severe self-critique of its
work (Orta 2004:73, 82; Rufino 2002:147), especially after the
Second Conference of the Latin American Episcopate in Med-
ellin in 1968, the church established that marginalized peo-
ples, including indigenous communities, were actually closer
to Christian ideals than Euro-Americans. The Indians were
transformed from barbarian humans into Christian exem-
plars, and missionary activity began to be based on the prin-
ciple of “incarnatio” or “inculturation”: as Jesus had done,
the missionary should live like the Indians and in this way
spread the “good news” (Orta 2004; Rufino 2002:134, 149;
Shapiro 1981; Viveiros de Castro 1992, 2002). Just like the
imitation of shamans by some missionaries cited earlier, this
is a very different movement from the differentiation prac-
ticed by the Indians: here it consists of a means of revealing
10. See Clifford (1992:78) and Vilaça (2013) for comments on this
text; see also Strathern (1988:268–271) and Taylor (1996).
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 10, December 2014
the underlying similarities believed to exist between indige-
nous culture and Christian conventions. As Cabalzar (1999)
observed concerning the recent activities of the Salesians
among the Tukano, they never ceased to want to make Chris-
tians out of the Indians, although now they no longer wished
them to cease being Indians.
In the words of the late bishop Dom Roberto, “Wari’ my-
thology contains many things of great Christian value. We
must recapitulate. Respect their tradition for the catechism.
If we merely present our doctrine without reflecting on their
mythology, if we disdain this mythology, as believers we have
to start from zero, and from zero nobody goes anywhere”
(Dom Roberto, personal communication, 1993).
As Shapiro (1981:143) observed, the missionaries estab-
lished a difference between faith and religion. Faith is uni-
versal, transcending cultural differences, but it needs to be
“incarnated” in a concrete religion. Religion—which merges
with culture, and in this sense the Indians “transpired relig-
iosity from every pore” (Viveiros de Castro 1992:25)—is the
institutional apparatus through which faith is expressed in
particular societies, and if this culture is destroyed, expression
of faith becomes impossible. The missionaries therefore ad-
vocated a sacred respect for the indigenous culture understood
through their own concepts (Shapiro 1981:146; Vilaça 2002b).
The repercussions of the Second Vatican Council led in
1970 to the expulsion of the Bolivian agent in charge of Sa-
garana village and the transfer of its administration to lay
missionaries from the indigenist missionary council
(Conselho Indigenista Missionário [CIMI]), directly linked to
the Brazilian bishopric (Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do
Brasil). Following the church guidelines, and as we can deduce
from Dom Roberto’s dialogue, they avoided direct religious
proselytism (which they had not been doing anyway), al-
though they looked wherever possible to make explicit con-
nections between Christian stories and morality and the Wari’
mythology, which generated a whole series of equivocations.11
For instance, at a Christmas mass held in the village in 1993
where I was present, Dom Roberto was reading the Gospel
on the birth of Jesus and the arrival of the Three Magi in
Portuguese, when he asked a Wari’ man to tell a similar story.
The man stood up and narrated a myth about a baby killed
by his paternal grandmother (i.e., his mother’s mother-in-
law), which led to the killing of the old woman by the mother’s
brothers. Cut into small pieces, only the clitoris remained,
which they then hid in various different places to laugh at
the killers and provoke them. The filial relationship in the
Gospel was transformed into affinity (mother-in-law/daugh-
ter-in-law) in the Wari’ translation (Vilaça 2002b; on the no-
tion of translative equivocity, see Viveiros de Castro 2004).
Given that from the Catholic viewpoint, the church’s past
actions were in great part responsible for indigenous “culture
loss,” one of CIMI’s explicit actions involves recovering it,
11. See Taylor (1981) on the effects of this kind of syncretism among
the Jivaroan Achuar.
Vilaça Culture and Self
because they depend on culture to transmit the Christian
message.12 This brusque turnabout in the direction of Catholic
missionary work was experienced by the native peoples of
Portuguese and Spanish America as a whole, and their puz-
zlement was intensified by the fact that such different actions
were undertaken by the same institution and sometimes by
the same people (Orta 2004). This is what the Salesians did
in relation to the Bororo: in the past the priests destroyed the
men’s house, while today they encourage the Indians to build
it; in the past they stored Western clothes so that they did
not get them dirty, while today they store the feather adorn-
ments so that they do not sell them (Novaes 1999:351). Ac-
cording to Jackson (1995), the same occurred among the
Tukano: in 1970 a priest justified the destruction of the com-
munal houses, claiming that they were “temples of demon-
worship and encouragements to promiscuity.” In 1991,
though, a Catholic newspaper published a photo of the com-
munal house with the caption, “our longhouses are also tem-
ples of God” (Jackson 1995:10; see also Cabalzar 1999).
Today it is the lack of “culture” that is punished, albeit
implicitly. A man from Sagarana told me in 2005 that one of
the lay missionaries had told him that he would no longer
enter the Wari’ houses because they no longer build them
from straw and wood but from bricks and asbestos tiles. As
Carneiro da Cunha (2009) observed in her analysis of the
invention of intellectual property legislation, it does not occur
to legislators (or to missionaries) that “entire peoples . . . may
think of their culture as exogenous, obtained from others”
(329; also see 361).13
Destroying or preserving are variations on the same theme,
although we cannot deny their distinct effects on the Indians.
While in the past they probably did not understand of what
they were guilty, today they feel guilty about abandoning their
“culture.” As a Wari’ man from Sagarana told me, in Por-
tuguese, when we were talking about the idea of animal spirits
causing diseases, “Perhaps I disdain my own culture a bit,
but I don’t believe it.” For their part, the Wari’ from Sagarana
condemn this disdain on the part of the Evangelical Wari’,
as one Wari’ woman complained, “they only want to know
about religion. That isn’t good. You have to value the things
of the ancient ones. You have to know about the past, not
just the present.” The “sacralization” of culture by the mis-
sionaries makes its transgression a kind of sin.
Just as guilt emerges amid culture, so the devil returns, this
time associated with the state. It is precisely in the arena of
political struggles in favor of indigenous rights—central to
the work of the Catholics—that they chose to enact the op-
position between good and evil and that the Evangelical Chris-
tians objectify in the figures of God and the devil. Hence,
12. On the relation between “culture,” “property,” and “recovery,” see
Carneiro da Cunha (2009:317, 364).
13. Considering that I am affirming that culture is innate, I have to
clarify here that from the Indians’ point of view (at least from the point
of view of the Wari’), they are not “obtaining culture” but making their
bodies different.
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S329
although they seek to act out a version of Christianity that
focuses on good (visible or hidden in all persons and cultures),
their apprehension of the representatives of the state—
whether they are government employees, legislators, politi-
cians, and so on—bears an impressive similarity to the Evan-
gelical version of the devil. They are always pretending to be
kind and correct people to trick the Indians, tempting them
with generous offers but poised to attack them unexpectedly.
Conclusions
The above analyses allow us to conclude that the dialectic
between continuity and rupture can be apprehended from
various perspectives: in the relation between the Wari’ Chris-
tian experience and the pre-Christian universe, in the work
of Catholic and Evangelical missionaries, and in terms of
Catholic action itself over the years. Returning to the initial
proposal of this article—that is, comparing the effects of dif-
ferent forms of missionary work among the Wari’—we are
prompted to ask, can we establish a relation between the
effects of the “conversion to community” (Pollock 1993) or
the conversion to “culture” achieved by the Catholics and the
Evangelical conversion focused on the constitution of the
self?14
In relation specifically to individualism, the works of Pol-
lock (1993:189) and Taylor (1981:652) comparing the si-
multaneous activities of Catholic missionaries and Evangelical
missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics among
the Amazonian Culina and Achuar, respectively, show that
both kinds of missionaries base their work on clearly indi-
vidualist conceptions recognized by the Indians as such,
whether adopting or rejecting them. The most important dif-
ference according to the authors resides in the fact that the
individualizing premises are made explicit by the Evangelicals
while they remain implicit in Catholic practice. Among the
Achuar, the Evangelicals laud routinized physical work and
relate success in accumulating capital to divine assistance,
while the Catholics created a cooperative system ruled by a
notion of property alien to the Indians (Taylor 1981:669). The
cooperative created among the Culina is also the example
chosen by Pollock (1993) to illustrate what seems to be an
important equivocation made by the Catholics. The removal
of goods for sale was related to a notion of individual pro-
ductivity that, as for the Wari’ involved in the Sagarana co-
operative that I was able to see operating in the 1990s, was
not traditionally valued. According to Pollock (1993:183) the
system—based on the idea that social relations could be mea-
sured by individually owned goods—violated the Culina view
of sociability, which led them to reject the missionary projects
and thus Christianity.
However, although we lack in-depth studies on the theme,
14. On the association between “community/collectivity” and “cul-
ture,” see Carneiro da Cunha (2009:327). Given the limits of the present
paper, I have decided not to mention here the extensive literature on
“culture,” or kastom, especially rich in the Melanesian context.
 S330
the effects of the different forms of catechizing for many
Amazonian groups are apparently highly distinct, because
with the new Catholicism, many resumed—sometimes after
many years of abandonment—some of their rituals and par-
ticularly shamanism (see Opas 2008) in which complex, re-
lationalist (Robbins 2004), dividual (Mosko 2010; Strathern
1988), and differentiating (Wagner 1975) notions of person
and culture are involved. Among those in simultaneous con-
tact with both variants of Christianity—as in the case of the
Paumari (Bonilla 2009) and the Piro/Yine (Opas 2008),
among others—the Catholics are seen by the Evangelicals as
those who possess the “culture” of the ancient ones. Among
these groups, some have made use of this opposition to ac-
tualize their own dichotomies, as in the case of the Kaingang
(Veiga 2004), the Piro/Yine (Opas 2008), and the Baniwa
(Wright 1999), who began to express the distinctions between
social groups through their different conversions to one or
the other church (for a similar case in Africa, see Meyer 1999).
The resumption of traditional practices through the con-
cept of “culture” brought by Catholic missionaries (as well
as by members of NGOs, government workers, and anthro-
pologists) suggests, as Carneiro da Cunha argued (2009:355–
363), the possibility of coexistence between this objectified
culture and the notion of traditional culture, each being en-
acted in a different relational context: the former in the “in-
terethnic” context, and the latter in the properly indigenous
context (Carneiro da Cunha 2009:359). According to Carneiro
da Cunha, the native interest in maintaining these notions in
separate systems can be observed in the fact that they do not
look to translate this term, always using foreign words (Car-
neiro da Cunha 2009:369).15
There are a few problems with this statement regarding the
Wari’. Although they talk about their “culture” (which did
not occur until recently in Evangelical villages), the people in
Sagarana do not perform traditional rituals but rather festivals
in the style of their Makurap (Tupi) neighbors, from whom
they have imported manioc beer. Neither are there shamans,
and people speak in Portuguese much more fluently than in
the Evangelical villages, a consequence of the monolingualism
of the priests and collaborators as well as the presence, albeit
small, of Indians from other ethnic groups with whom they
converse in Portuguese. Understandably, in contrast to what
happens among other indigenous groups in contact with the
two Christian denominations, the Evangelicals do not asso-
ciate the Catholics with practitioners of culture. Indeed, they
fear for the posthumous fate of their kin, whose drinking,
marital betrayals, lies, and thieving will lead them directly to
hell, where a process of endless roasting will turn them into
prey for eternity.
The differences between Protestants and Catholics, which
have led to wars and killings elsewhere in the world, are
15. For an analogous example of the coexistence between distinct sys-
tems in separate contexts, see Barker (1993) on the Christian experience
of the Maisin.
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Current Anthropology Volume 55, Supplement 10, December 2014
conceived by the Evangelical Wari’ to arise from an ancient
alimentary question: when Moses descended from the moun-
tain and saw the people worshipping stone idols, he trans-
formed the statues into dust, mixed them into a drink, and
made them drink it; consequently, the Catholics today wor-
ship stone images. “Culture” is translated as food or body.16
This suggests that the Wari’ concept of culture does not fit
exactly with the anthropological notion involved in Carneiro
da Cunha’s model. As I commented above, we call “culture”
a set of rules and models for action that are translated by
several Amazonian peoples as “body,” which is what differ-
entiates persons and whole groups (including animal spirits).
So, the new concept of culture introduced by the Catholic
missionaries does not relate to the traditional one as a kind
of contextual transformation, involving instead a whole new
idea. Instead of innate attributes that are shared by all human
beings, who act them out differently because of their different
bodies, culture became a set of things, which includes rituals,
myths, songs, and objects.
According to Wagner’s (1975) model, which locates the
difference between modern and tribal peoples in their distinct
views of invention, the conception of culture as the result of
conventionalizing human agency is characteristic of modern
Euro-Americans, while tribal peoples (among others) take
culture as a given and work on “unpredicting” (Wagner 1975:
145) it through a constant work of differentiation, which, for
those Amazonians mentioned here, means body differentia-
tion. However, there is one interesting point in Wagner’s ar-
gument that could help us sustain the argument of Carneiro
da Cunha (2009) on the coexistence of the two kinds of
concepts: cultures that differentiate can occasionally delib-
erately invert the direction of their inventive movement to
make conventions, occasions that we name “ritual,” reserving
for it a special place and time. I suggest that “culture in quote
marks,” also enacted in a specific space and relational context
(the “interethnic” one), could be associated with ritual as an
occasion for making conventions. As in the dialectical play
between invention and convention (Wagner 1975:116), these
two models do not coexist within a hierarchical frame but
alternate, which is consistent with the way these people enact
the process of Other becoming, as we saw above.
Coming back to the notion of self—although, as we have
seen, a concept of inner self is coming to life among Evan-
gelicals—we may still see the functioning of this alternating
model through the analysis of how Christian concepts have
been translated into the Wari’ language. The traditional notion
of personhood is preserved through the permanence of the
original meaning of the words, such as the one for spirit/
double, which points to a dividual and relational person even
16. I should make clear that in contrast to what happens among other
Catholic groups, especially in Brazilian urban and rural environments
(see Mayblin 2014), and even among some Catholic indigenous groups,
where saint festivals are commemorated, saints were never worshipped
in Wari’ Catholicism. The observation cited here applies especially to
Catholic priests.
Vilaça Culture and Self
though something a bit different might be happening insofar
as this new conception of self is accompanied by the narrow-
ing of the notion of humanity. When the Wari’ stabilize them-
selves in the human position, the inventive process that used
to take as its starting point the extended humanity, making
kinship a process of differentiating humans out of others (see
Vilaça 2002a, 2005), looses its meaning. As innate humans,
they now have to make themselves moral persons, making
invention a process of identifying as children of God people
who are naturally different among themselves. This kind of
change of the innate world (or change of ontology; see Descola
2005) is what Wagner (1975) observed in Christian missions
where, according to him, they shift from a view of action as
a “continual adventure in ‘unpredicting’ the world” (145) and
life as an “inventive sequence” (146) toward an attempt to
conform to the code.
At least for the Wari’ (and the Kanak, following Leenhardt
1971 [1947]), it seems that the traditional self is inseparable
from the extended humanity, as if the present inhumanity of
animals means that the Wari’ can no longer conceive life as
they did. What they see as agency seems to be changing and,
consequently, so is what they conceive as their innate world
(see Kelly 2011:6; Robbins 2002:6). But they are unpredictable,
and things change fast. Some young Evangelical men are now
taking university degrees and also working as teachers in their
villages; they have begun to teach children traditional “cul-
ture,” especially myths, which ceased being narrated by their
parents and grandparents some years ago. In December 2012,
one of these teachers, my Wari’ brother, Abrão, brought me
as a gift some charming drawings made by children in his
classroom to illustrate the myths. A clear representation of
the human-animal character of one of these mythic figures,
shown in the drawing of a jaguar (copacao) recently made by
a 15-year-old girl, lead me to imagine that the learning of
“culture” by this new generation of Evangelicals has become
a way of recapturing the innate world’s mixture of human
and animal, albeit now domesticated by its confinement to
myth.
Acknowledgments
Fieldwork among the Wari’ was funded by the Wenner-Gren
Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Fun-
dação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro,
and Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientı́fico e Tec-
nológico and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do
Rio de Janeiro. My special thanks go to Joel Robbins for his
comments as well as for conceiving and organizing, along
with Leslie Aiello and Laurie Obbink, the Anthropology of
Christianity symposium. I also thank Naomi Haynes and the
other participants for their comments on the first version of
the paper as well as the anonymous reviewers for their careful
and insightful reading.
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S331
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