Abstract
This article raises an important issue in Amazonian ethnology, to wit, the insufficiency or limits of categories such as ‘people’, ‘culture’, ‘ethnic group’ or ‘society’ to narrate the experiences of our research interlocutors. In dialogue with Strathern’s notion of objectification, with Tânia Stolze Lima’s ideas about subject-groups and counter-hierarchical totalization, and with the ritual theory of Roy Wagner, I show how, among the Karo-Arara of Rondônia, a ‘people’ is the instantiation of an extended collective of relatives which can only come to exist in a specific and conventional form in ritual contexts, led by concrete subjects. The analytical exercise takes the ethnography of a festival, the Wayo ‘at Kanã, which is my interlocutors understand as, among other things, a cultural presentation.
Keywords:
Ritual; People-form; Perspective; Aesthetics; Cultural presentation