Casey High

Introduction: Making Ignorance an Ethnographic Object

It is not surprising that anthropologists, being academics, should value knowledge. After all, an academic life is a vocation to generate data, to act as a critic in order to detect and eradicate error, and to transmit the state of the art to the next generation. This pursuit of knowledge entails an ethics: knowledge is the value that justifies all aspects of academic activity, whether it is desired as a means of promoting other goods (health, happiness, wealth, well-being) or as an end in itself. The argument that underlies this volume is that anthropologists have too easily attributed to the people they study the same unambiguous desire for knowledge, and the same aversion to ignorance, that motivates their own work, with the result that situations in which ignorance is viewed neutrally—or even positively—have been misunderstood and overlooked.

Between Knowing and Being: Ignorance in Anthropology and Amazonian Shamanism

This article examines the ways in which Waorani people in Amazonian Ecuador insist on not knowing about shamanism. While shamanic practice is often understood to be a privileged site of “indigenous knowledge,” I argue that Waorani shamanism is less about acquiring, using, or losing an abstract body of knowledge than it is about the kind of perspective and social effect that its practice implies. Such an approach to the cultural particularities of “unknowing” allows us to question the ways in which knowledge has taken center stage in anthropology and wider debates about indigenous peoples. Beyond the strategic importance of ignorance in Waorani attempts to avoid witchcraft accusations, Amazonian understandings of perspectivism point to the ways in which knowing about shamanism cannot be fully separate from being a shaman. In this context, it is the absence of shamanic knowledge that is understood to constitute personhood and maintain peaceful relationships.

Keep on changing: Recent trends in Amazonian anthropology

In this article I review several recent books to consider how anthropologists have approached questions of cosmology, history, and social transformation in Amazonia. Several of these engage a now well-established tradition in presenting indigenous ontologies as radical alternatives to Western concepts of agency and history. In contrast to the discontinuities described in the “New History” of Amazonia, anthropologists tend to approach social transformation as the extension of an enduring symbolic economy of alterity. I argue that the “New Amazonian Ethnography” would benefit from an openness to understanding radical social change beyond questions of continuity.

Lost and found: Contesting isolation and cultivating contact in Amazonian Ecuador

In May 2003 a group of Waorani men in Amazonian Ecuador led an attack against their “uncontacted” Taromenani neighbors, resulting in a massacre that has fueled ongoing debates about the rights of indigenous people living in “voluntary isolation.” In this article I consider how Waorani understandings of the attack point to indigenous formulations of alterity that challenge what Lucas Bessire (2012) has described as the contemporary politics of isolation. I draw on recent discussions of kinship as a form of mutual belonging that extend beyond common substance (Sahlins 2013), and consider how, in the aftermath of the killings, many Waorani came to see spatially distant others as kinsmen who became disconnected from Waorani in past times. Understood by Waorani as kin of victims, the Taromenani have become both a source of desired relations and a potent image of indigenous strength and autonomy in the context of social and economic transformation.