Praying and Preying

Praying and Preying offers one of the rare anthropological monographs on the Christian experience of contemporary Amazonian indigenous peoples, based on an ethnographic study of the relationship between the Wari’, inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia, and the Evangelical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission. Vilaça turns to a vast range of historical, ethnographic and mythological material related to both the Wari’ and missionaries perspectives and the author’s own ethnographic field notes from her more than 30-year involvement with the Wari’ community. Developing a close dialogue between the Melanesian literature, which informs much of the recent work in the Anthropology of Christianity, and the concepts and theories deriving from Amazonian ethnology, in particular the notions of openness to the other, unstable dualism, and perspectivism, the author provides a fine-grained analysis of the equivocations and paradoxes that underlie the translation processes performed by the different agents involved and their implications for the transformation of the native notion of personhood.  

Aparecida Vilaça is Associate Professor at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of Strange Enemies, Quem somos nós, and Comendo como gente and coeditor of Native Christians. 

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

Introduction
1 • The New Tribes Mission
2 • Versions versus Bodies: Translations in Contact
3 • The Encounter with the Missionaries
4 • Eating God’s Words: Kinship and Conversion
5 • Praying and Preying
6 • Strange Creator
7 • Christian Ritual Life
8 • Moral Changes
9 • Personhood and Its Translations
Conclusion

Notes
References
Index