This text is concerned with a specific Indigenous category - usually translated as "owner" or "master" - which, in Amazonia, transcends the simple expression of a relationship of property or domain. The category and its reciprocal terms designate a generalized mode of relating that characterizes interactions between humans, between non-humans, between humans and non-humans and between persons and things. It is a key category for understanding Indigenous sociologies and cosmologies, which, notwithstanding its importance, has received relatively little attention. Through the analysis of ethnographical evidence, this text seeks to explore the consequences of imagining the Amerindian universe as a world of owners and the owner as a model for the magnified person, in order to discuss notions of ownership, domain and power in lowland South America.
Amazonia; Property; Power; Person; Individualism