Paper short abstract:

This paper is an analysis of the strategic display of ancient things in Trio houses, and how in indigenous northeastern Amazonia, this visible accumulation of old and useless things dispersed in a seemingly erratic manner around Amerindian households can be related to notions of personhood and the making of the body.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is an analysis of the strategic display of ancient things in Trio houses, and how in indigenous northeastern Amazonia, this visible accumulation of old and useless things dispersed in a seemingly erratic manner around Amerindian households can be related to notions of personhood and the making of the body. In the riperine villages of southern Suriname, Trio houses are a clutter of old things and discarded foods, and with increased sedentarization and the consequent establishment of houses which are not abandoned at the death of their founder, this architectural trend has become even more apparent, something which is frowned upon as un-cleanliness and general neglect by visiting missionaries. However, as will be argued in this paper, this apparent untidiness directly reflects aspects of the owner's personhood; by eliciting narratives of past events which highlight kinship paths and the involvement within distant spheres of alterity, they will be presented here as an outer layer of the body of the house's owner. This strategic, architectonic display of ancient things in Trio households and the relation of the former to other objects such as woven artefacts will be discussed in terms of Melanesian ideas of distributed personhood and abundance of social relations.