Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

I intend to explore how the series of shamanic procedures performed by the Eastern Tukanoan peoples, Northwest Amazon, at child's birth and complexified over the life are concerned to the composition of personhood and the managing of the relationships between humans and nonhumans.

Paper long abstract:

I intend to explore how the series of shamanic procedures performed by the Eastern Tukanoan peoples, dwellers of Tiquié river, Northwest Amazon, at child's birth and complexified over the life (male initiation, menarche, childbirth) are concerned to the composition of personhood and the managing of the relationships between humans and nonhumans (animals, plants, artefacts). I will be addressing some aspects of the shamanic spells related to the name giving, the baby's first bath and the child's feeding, in order to demonstrate how, on the one hand, these spells construct multiple or cyborg people (bodies/souls/thoughts) which are composed by human and nonhuman elements and affections, and on the other hand, they allow and protect people to engage into proper and safe relationships with nonhumans and their various environments in situations as feeding, bathing, growing, fishing. Finally, I demonstrate how these careful attitudes are founded in an ethics of relationship with the others that enables life to multiply and which has respect/regard as it main value.