2019FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9 (3): 687–693

TRANSLATION

Introduction
The place of “The construction of the person in indigenous
Brazilian societies” in Amazonian anthropology
Luiz C O S T A , Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

“The construction of the person in indigenous Brazilian
societies,” published here in English for the first time, is
a product of the concerns of Amazonian anthropology
during the 1970s, but also somewhat ahead of the curve.
It was originally published in 1979, in issue 32 (n.s.) of
the Boletim do Museu Nacional, the in-house publica-
tion of the National Museum of Brazil, located in Rio
de Janeiro. The issue included a number of articles based
on papers presented at a symposium called “Ethnological
Research in Brazil,” held in 1978 at the Museu Nacional
and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. In the table of
contents of the issue, the article published here is labeled
as the “Opening Conference,” and it is followed by three
“Communications”: an article on the construction of the
person among the Bororo by Renate Viertler, one on for-
mal friendship and theories of the person among the Gê-
speaking Krahó by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, and an
article on the fabrication of the body in the Upper Xingu
by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
The “Opening Conference” is a collective effort. Two
of the authors were already seasoned specialists on the
Indigenous societies of Central Brazil. Roberto DaMatta
had carried out research among the Apinayé of the state
of Tocantins (at the time the northern part of Goiás) dur-
ing the 1960s as part of the Harvard Central Brazil Proj-
ect, under the supervision of David Maybury-Lewis.1
Anthony Seeger was supervised by Terrence Turner (him-
self a participant in the Harvard Central Brazil Project) at
the University of Chicago, and carried out fieldwork
among the Gê-speaking Suyá from 1971 until recently
(Seeger 1980, 1981, 1987). Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
had just finished his MPhil on the Arawak-speaking Yaw-
alipiti of the Upper Xingu, supervised by DaMatta. He
had started his doctoral research under the supervision
of Seeger, though he had yet to begin fieldwork among
the Araweté, who had only been “contacted” in 1976 (Vi-
veiros de Castro [1986] 1992a). These institutional and
ethnological contexts, as well as the overlapping aca-
demic genealogies, help explain why this article was writ-
ten, and why it merits translation into English 40 years
after it was originally published.
The opening paragraph of the article reminds us that
any impact that the Indigenous people of Brazil, or,
more widely, lowland South America, may have had
on European thought predates the emergence of mod-
ern anthropology. The first monographs based on ex-
tended fieldwork in Amazonia were only published in
the 1960s: Irving Goldman’s on the Cubeo of North-
western Amazonia (1963); David Maybury-Lewis’s on
the Xavante of Central Brazil (1967); and Peter Rivière’s
on the Trio of the Guianas (1969).2 These ethnographies

readers may consult Coelho de Souza (2002: 178–90) and

1. The collective results of the Harvard Central Brazil Proj-
ect were published in Maybury-Lewis (1979a). DaMatta
(1979) contributed a chapter on Apinayé relationship
terminology. His monograph on the Apinayé was pub-
lished in Portuguese in 1976 (1982). The Harvard Cen-
tral Brazil Project was a major turning point in the an-
thropology of Indigenous lowland South America. Along
with Maybury-Lewis’s introduction to the edited volume,
Melatti (2002).
2. As with any digest history, this one is evidently unfair. We
have excellent data from early naturalists and travelers
through Amazonia, such as Theodor Koch-Grünberg, and
from fieldworkers such as Curt Nimuendajú. The latter, in
many ways, set the themes for the study of Central Brazilian
societies, and hence has an explicit influence in the ethno-
graphic investigations of the 1970s, even if often as a foil.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 9, number 3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/706881

© 2019 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2019/0903-0022$10.00
 Luiz COSTA
set the agenda for the 1970s: the vast majority of research
on lowland South America continued to focus on these
three regions, and the theoretical issues which Amazonia
struggled with were very much anchored in the themes
these ethnographies uncovered. Indeed, despite impor-
tant comparative efforts at finding common principles
to the region, principles based on shallow notions of time,
a common philosophy of social existence, and control
over scarce resources (e.g. Overing 1981, 1983–84; Rivière
1984: 101–109), it was still possible in the 1980s to refer to
a triad of ethnological shorthand labels—the “dialectical
societies” of Central Brazil (Maybury-Lewis 1979a), the
“minimalist societies” of the Guianas, and the “metaphys-
ical societies” of Northwest Amazonia (Viveiros de Cas-
tro 1986: 273)—which captured local specificities, and
which would have been easily recognizable to specialists
in the region, and arguably remain meaningful today.
As the article makes clear, the main theoretical hurdle
for the development of Amazonian anthropology during
the 1970s was the search for a focal idiom or positive trait
that could define the societies of the region. Having come
late to anthropology, Amazonian societies were inter-
preted against models developed elsewhere and imported
into the region—and they always fell short. African lin-
eages, Southeast Asian alliance systems, Melanesian
networks of gift exchange, none of these seemed to cap-
ture what was specific to Amazonia. On the contrary,
they created distortions which were interpreted as defi-
ciencies. Thus, the societies of the region were described
as fluid or amorphous, as loosely structured or incho-
ate, all of which, as Seeger, DaMatta and Viveiros de
Castro remind us “are negative concepts in relation to
a norm. The positive aspects of this South American
‘non-normality’ has not yet been explored; to do so,
we must elaborate concepts that account for the South
American material in its own terms, avoiding African,
There were also a number of important syntheses, based on
incipient research or colonial sources, which had a signifi-
cant influence in stimulating research on Amazonian soci-
eties (Roth 1924; Steward 1946–1950). Finally, there are eth-
nographic studies that anticipate or are contemporary with
the three works from the 1960s singled out here, such as
Robert Murphy’s among the Mundurucu (e.g. 1958, 1960),
Niels Fock’s among the Waiwai (1963) and a few others.
It is, however, fair to say, I think, that these studies did
not have the same impact in the Amazonian anthropology
of the succeeding decades as those of Goldman, Rivière, and
Maybury-Lewis, which are part of the canon of Amazonian
anthropology (see Overing 1989; Rival and Whitehead 2001;
Coelho de Souza 2002: 178–190).
688
Mediterranean, or Melanesian models” (p. 697). The
authors’ response to these negative depictions was to
proclaim that “the originality of tribal societies in Brazil
(and more broadly, South America) lies in an especially
rich elaboration of the notion of the person, with special
reference to the body as a focal symbolic idiom” (p. 694).
It is not only that we should pay attention to person
and body in Amazonia—we should do that everywhere.
It is rather that only a focus on the person and the body
could counter the then-persistent image of incomplete
Amazonian societies, always lacking sociological pegs
and institutional frameworks (Ramos 1990: 459–61).
The body, for the authors, is taken to be a bundle of fluids
(blood, semen, etc.) and their communication with the
exterior through processes such as eating, sexual inter-
course, scarification, tattooing, ornamentation, and so
forth. Gê speakers organize personal and social space in
terms of substance or its negation via ceremonial means
(see Turner 1980). For Xinguan societies, the dynamics
of disease and its shamanic cure provided the founda-
tion of the ceremonial system that articulates a regional
system (see Barcelos Neto 2008). The Tukanoan peoples
of the upper Rio Negro were described as conceiving of
the cosmos through sexual imagery (Reichel-Dolmatoff
1971).3 Although the precise role of bodily fluids and
their interactions varies between regions, the authors
nonetheless forcefully proclaim that “indigenous socio-
logic is based on a physiologic” (p. 699), pointing Ama-
zonian anthropology away from the deficient character-
izations that had predominated and towards its positive
development in the subsequent decades.4
“The construction of the person in indigenous Bra-
zilian societies” is thus an article about “the significance
of place in the construction of anthropological theory”
(Appadurai 1986: 356), an affirmation of the inescap-
able “regionalization of ethnographic accounts” (Fardon
1990).5 It is a reaction to the widespread anthropological
3. Such characterizations reflect understandings of Amazo-
nian societies at the time. Many have since been revised.
4. I should note that not all earlier theories of Amazonian so-
cieties were “negative,” in the sense that they defined Am-
azonian societies by the absence of certain traits found else-
where. Pierre Clastres’s ([1974] 1989) theory of Amazonian
societies as societies-against-the-state is an obvious excep-
tion. Here the “absence of the state” is not interpreted as
a deficiency, but as an active refusal.
5. It hence mirrors a similar coming-of-age moment for
the anthropology of the New Guinea highlands (Barnes
689 THE PLACE OF “THE CONSTRUCTION
view that Amazonia was an exotic backwater that was
marginal to the core concerns of anthropology (see Ste-
phen Hugh-Jones in Lasmar and Gordon 2015: 635–
37). In a way, it is the culmination of this reaction, that
begins in the 1960s, with the Harvard Central Brazil Proj-
ect’s stated aim of revealing that, for Gê-speaking peo-
ples, kinship and social organization were a “branch of
cultural classification” (Maybury-Lewis 1979b: 12), hence
transfiguring the problem of the typology of kinship clas-
sification into a problem of the construction of the person
through the flow of substance and its ceremonial rear-
rangements (see Coelho de Souza 2002: 184–86). The im-
mediate spark for the article was Overing’s foundational
call to refuse exogenous models and embrace native low-
land South American categories, to accept that “political-
jural units are not part of a permanent logical structure
of society as conceived by the Indians, which is rather
a structure which lies on the ceremonial, metaphysical
plane” (Overing 1977: 391).
The idea that a focus on the construction of the per-
son, with a special reference to the body, was somehow
cutting edge in the late 1970s may seem surprising. The
authors are careful to acknowledge that the category of
the “person” had been central to anthropology since
pretty much its inception, while also listing a number
of pioneering studies of the body (p. 695). The 1970s
was, of course, a decade in which the body started to
become ubiquitous: culture was embodied in public acts
(Geertz 1973), dispositions were “embedded in agents’
very bodies” (Bourdieu [1972] 1978: 15), and power
was “implanted in bodies” (Foucault 1980: 44). Like-
wise, the idea that the categories of kinship and social
organization were bound up with processes linked to
the creation of the person and with cultural classifica-
tions was one of the more palpable results of the cri-
tique of kinship that began in the 1960s (e.g. Schneider
1968). There are, nonetheless, a couple of facts that
make this Amazonianist emphasis on the body as a lo-
cal theory differ from the “embodiment” craze that
took over anthropology and the humanities in the wake
of the global demise in popularity of Structuralism.
The first is that the Amazonianist “discovery” of the
body is clearly predicated on the native Amazonian
stress on the body. As Vilaça states (2005: 446), “though
it comprises a problem for Americanists, the body is
1962; Wagner 1974), which also critiqued imported mod-
els before settling on an idiom appropriate to the ethno-
graphic description of the region’s societies.
OF THE PERSON IN INDIGENOUS BRAZILIAN SOCIETIES”
even more of a problem for native peoples, who spend a
sizeable portion of their daily lives executing processes
they conceive to be linked to the fabrication and con-
trolled transformation of bodies.” It is hence not a reac-
tion to cosmopolitan theory (though it clearly engages
this theory), or a turn to phenomenological approaches
or to “practice” theories (Vilaça 2005: 447). The body is
not a way out of the impasses of Structuralism. It is,
rather, an ethnological solution to an ethnological prob-
lem. Indeed, even the appeal to the Gê and Xinguan eth-
nographies that were the expertise of Seeger, DaMatta,
and Viveiros de Castro explains the role of a “symbolic
idiom” of substances and its flows. While substance has
remained an important aspect of Amazonian studies of
the body (e.g. Storrie 2003), it has certainly lost ground,
as ethnographic interest expanded into “knowledgeable
bodies” (McCallum 1996) or “perspectival bodies” (Vi-
veiros de Castro 1998). Incidentally, this ethnological
grounding of the body in native Amazonian concerns
might explain why, much as the Amazonian turn to the
body occurred independently of the wider anthropolog-
ical turn to the body, the Amazonian literature on the
body was equally, for a long time, ignored by cosmo-
politan anthropologies of the body (Vilaça 2005: 447;
Viveiros de Castro 1999: 141).
Second, while the sudden rise in studies of the body
in anthropology in the 1970s is linked to the exhaustion
of the Structuralist paradigm, and the attending move
from structure to practice, the body in Amazonia emerged
very much within the Structuralist tradition. If the focus
on substances was (Gê and Xinguan) ethnographic the-
ory, it was prefigured by Lévi-Strauss’s work, which, of
course, took Amazonia as its ethnographic springboard
(Taylor 2011). As Viveiros de Castro has written of the
Mythologiques, summing up much of what I have writ-
ten in this preface:
At first sight a study purely dedicated to Amerindian
mythologies, the Mythologiques revealed something that
ethnologists who were beginning their studies of Ama-
zonia soon found out: that the symbolic materials which
South American societies make use of in order to con-
stitute themselves, and hence the structures construable
by the analyst, were refractory to the traditional cat-
egories of anthropology. Cosmological principles em-
bedded in oppositions of sensible qualities, a symbolic
economy of alterity inscribed in the body and material
flows, a way of articulating with “nature” that presup-
poses a universal sociality—these were the materials
and processes that seemed to take the place of the jural
 Luiz COSTA
and economicist idioms with which anthropology had
described societies from other parts of the world [. . .]
Far from constituting “super-structural” or “cultural”
content of South American formations, those materials
and processes directly articulated an Indigenous sociol-
ogy” (Viveiros de Castro 1999: 146–47, my translation,
emphasis in original).
It is sometimes quipped that so many Amazonian eth-
nographies lean towards Structuralism because of the
over-riding influence of Lévi-Strauss on the anthropol-
ogy of the continent. But as Viveiros de Castro (1999:
152) has suggested, the arrow of causation seems to
go the other way: it is Lévi-Strauss who went to study
in Amazonia, first as an ethnographer, and later as a
tireless reader of Amazonian ethnographies. While
there is certainly a complex mutual constitution of eth-
nography and theory, the impact of Amerindian thought
on Lévi-Strauss’s writing has been well documented
(Taylor 1984; Viveiros de Castro 1999: 152–156; Coelho
de Souza and Fausto 2004; Costa and Fausto 2010: 91–93).
The influence of Lévi-Strauss’s work on the region does
not, of course, mean that all Amazonianists are Struc-
turalists. It does, however, mean that Amazonianists can-
not ignore Lévi-Strauss, nor see his work as being some-
how superseded, but instead must always engage with it,
even if critically (see Turner 2009). The Amazonian body
is not a critique of Structuralism, but its vindication.
* * *
Reading this translation now, having read the Portu-
guese version as a student many times over, and having
now taught it for more than a decade, a couple of things
become evident. The first is that although the article, as
Rivière (1993: 509) noted some time ago, “has proved
decisively influential,” this influence did not come im-
mediately. This is no doubt in part, as Rivière also ac-
knowledges, because it was published in a language
marginal to anthropological theory, and in a journal
with a restricted circulation. However, there seems to
be another reason for its delayed acclaim. The early
years of the 1980s was a transitional phase for Amazo-
nian anthropology, which started to abandon the insig-
nificant position it had occupied in anthropological
theorizing to assume a central place in the discipline.
This move began with a change in field sites. Without
ever abandoning research in Central Brazil, the Guianas,
and the Upper Rio Negro, a new generation of field-
workers moved into lesser known parts of lowland South
America, to study with little-known (in some cases
690
unknown) peoples: Bruce Albert (1985) went to the
Brazilian Yanomami; Philippe Descola ([1986] 1994) to
Jivaroan Achuar of Ecuadorian Amazonia; and Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro ([1986] 1992a) to the Tupi-Guarani-
speaking Araweté. These magisterial ethnographies,
among the best the discipline of anthropology has
ever produced, launched what we might call, following
Overing’s insight quoted above, a “metaphysical” wave
of research, focusing on the relation between nature
and culture, on cosmology, eschatology, death rituals
and shamanism, and on the ritual integration of multi-
village communities. While the processes of construc-
tion of the person featured in these studies, particularly
in analyses of kinship and onomastics, they were sub-
sumed under the cosmological conditions of social pro-
cesses—indeed, on the Amerindian critiques of the con-
cepts of “nature” and “society.”
The second aspect of the article that, on hindsight, is
revealed to me now, is how much of the dominant lines
of research in Brazilian ethnology were prefigured in
this article. The first of these is, precisely, how the meta-
physical wave of Amazonian ethnographies was an in-
evitable sequitur to the article: Seeger, DaMatta, and
Viveiros de Castro move effortlessly from an affirma-
tion of the centrality of the person and the body to the
outline of a radical reframing of recurring oppositions,
such as that between nature/culture and individual/col-
lective. There is also the prescient observation that a fo-
cus on the human body does not preclude the animal
body, but rather brings the animal into the realm of
the human while thrusting the human into the domain
of animals, a theme that not only would later be central
to Amazonian anthropology, but which also, arguably,
is its defining characteristic (Descola 1992; Viveiros de
Castro 1998). Finally, there is the incisive sketch of a
research project on what we might call an Amazonian
theory of the individual—or, rather, of the person who,
by virtue of his or her biography, is made to stand out-
side of the community of common bodies, hence wield-
ing influence over it: “the person outside the group who
reflects on it and is thus able to modify and guide it”
(p. 700). This theory of the shaman, the chief, the sor-
cerer, and their enhanced selfhood (Taylor 1996: 209)
has recently resurfaced, either in studies of the magnified
owner-masters (Fausto 2008) or of its converse, the
sorcerer (Vanzolini 2015).
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the body resur-
faced as the main locus of anthropological theorizing
in Amazonia, particularly in anthropology developed
691 THE PLACE OF “THE CONSTRUCTION
outside of Brazil. It became central to the work of
Joanna Overing and her students, a group that has been
called the “English School of Americanism” (Taylor
1996: 206). Here studies of the body became closely
tied up with the construction of gender differences and
with the intimacy and care of quotidian kinship prac-
tices, adding an ethnographic density to our understand-
ing of the Amazonian body that has reverberated into
the Brazilian School of Americanism (see Gow 1991;
Overing and Passes 2000; McCallum 2001; Belaunde
2001; Overing 2003). During the mid to late 1980s,
Viveiros de Castro coordinated a project in the Museu
Nacional called “Ethnography and analytical models:
Types of social structure in southern Amazonia.”6 The
aim of this project was quite explicitly to supervise a
generation of students who would carry out research
among little-known Indigenous people. A number of eth-
nographies by students of Viveiros de Castro emerged
from this, first as master’s dissertations and doctoral
theses during the 1980s and 1990s, and later as publi-
cations: Aparecida Vilaça on the Wari’ (1992; [2006]
2010), Carlos Fausto on the Parakanã ([2001] 2012);
Tânia Lima on the Yudjá (Juruna) (2005); Marco Antonio
Gonçalves on the Pirahã (1993, 2001); Márnio Teixeira-
Pinto on the Arara (1997); Márcio Silva on the Waimiri-
Atroari (2009); among others (Viveiros de Castro 1992b:
xxii). The theme of the person and the body was cen-
tral to many of these studies, and those occurring else-
where in the country, now influenced by the gains of
ethnographies being written in the United Kingdom
and elsewhere, but always harking back to the seminal
insights of “The construction of the person in indige-
nous Brazilian societies.”7
6. Some of the collective results of this research group are
gathered in Viveiros de Castro and Carneiro da Cunha
(1993) and Viveiros de Castro (1995). A major theoreti-
cal statement based on the ethnographies produced by
Viveiros de Castro and his students is Viveiros de Castro
([1993] 2018).
7. As a short introduction to a classic of Brazilian Ama-
zonianist anthropology, I am naturally focusing on Bra-
zilian contributions, and particularly those related to the
Museu Nacional, over those from elsewhere. This is a
highly artificial effect of my aim: Amazonian anthropol-
ogy has always been cosmopolitan, and a serious history
needs to trace the many mutual influences that brought it
to the center of anthropological concerns (see Viveiros
de Castro 1996, 1999).
OF THE PERSON IN INDIGENOUS BRAZILIAN SOCIETIES”
* * *
On September 2, 2018, the Museu Nacional burned
down. A new Museum is being built, and new lines of re-
search can be envisaged in the changing configuration of
the institution’s academic and student body—not to men-
tion the drastic changes affecting Indigenous communi-
ties, changes that, although ever ongoing, have rarely been
as calamitous as under the Bolsonaro government. In re-
cent years, the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology
of the Museu Nacional has reserved places for Indigenous
students, and to date it has awarded at least 14 Master’s
and Doctoral degrees to native Brazilian anthropologists.
As Brazilian anthropology moves forward, HAU is pleased
to publish here one of its landmark studies, which still
captures the imagination of students and researchers.
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