Paper short abstract:

The paper explores Huni Kuin practices that constitute sociality as they simultaneously create themselves inter-subjectively in specific configurations of space-time grounded in a material theory of the person. Territory is not fixed but contingent on the ever-transforming co-presence of Huni Kuin

Paper long abstract:

The paper explores Cashinahua practices that constitute sociality as they simultaneously create themselves inter-subjectively as Real People (Huni Kuin) Such collective autopoiesis takes place in specific configurations of space and time, grounded in a material theory of the person. Material practice creates persons and the contexts that they inhabit within and between distinct levels of the cosmos. Huni Kuin constitute relatedness in a historical sense, a process derived from a properly indigenous phenomenology which encompasses flows of both substance and discourse, ordering their creative energy according to a dualist logic. A key aspect of these processes is constant reference to value. The ethnography shows that, although day-to-day discourse and political oratory may often be moralizing in tone and homiletic in content, Huni Kuin are not moral philosophers. Rather, trust and mistrust, love and anger, generosity and miserliness, are treated phenomenologically as emerging from affects and properties that are materially embodied in the person over time, extrapolated in intentional thought and action. As epistemological events, they are also corporeal ones. And as corporeal events, they link the person into the time and space of her or his own constitution. Thus Huni Kuin territory, from this perspective, is not fixed and immutable but contingent on the ever-growing and transforming co-presence of productively engaged living Huni Kuin, among other bodies and 'persons'. The paper engages critically with the debates on perspectivism as it sets out the need for placing Huni Kuin phenomenology at the centre of the analytical frame