Paper short abstract:

The elicitation of 'pity' among Amazonian Urarina is a deeply embodied as well as eminently political process. It grounds an everyday politics of redistribution that owes little to notions of fairness or equality.

Paper long abstract:

Egalitarianism as a political stance can often seem to imply relatively formal or explicit concepts of fairness, justice or equality among members of a circumscribed social space. Among Amazonian Urarina, however - who might well be described as 'egalitarian' - redistributive politics is primarily driven by elicitations of 'pity' or 'compassion' (caichaojoa), a positive form of attunement, closely linked to love and indignation, in which people are compelled to act by virtue of their emotional response to the perceived suffering of others. Rather than equality per se, the starting point of this process is precisely the difference, inequality or asymmetry between persons, and a relative absence of reciprocity. Elicitations of pity imply an absence of calculation and a willingness to 'forget' past judgements or grievances - though certainly not an absence of strategy, hence the relative preponderance of self-deprecating remarks and forms of humour. Pervasive in Urarina life, pity is thus a deeply embodied as well as eminently political emotion, though it points to a form of everyday politics that owes more to an ethics of care than an ethics of justice.