Individuals among People of the Center (Colombian Amazon) produced numerous discursive depictions of themselves and of others, regarding their own competence and morality and others' lacks thereof. Here, I attend particularly to a set of portrayals that pertained mostly to men: those concerning forms of knowledge that each People of the Center deemed uniquely their own. Individuals stressed the great amount of knowledge they possessed, the propriety of their processes of acquisition and the legitimacy of their use of it, its effectiveness and authentically patrilineal character, and the respect and fear others had of them because of it. They also criticized others for shortcomings in these regards. They articulated their evaluations in terms of what they found to be admirable or desirable in gendered human subjectivity and action, in the frame of a perspectival cosmos permeated by predatory relations. I argue that individuals produced such portrayals motivated by desire to embody a certain ideal of masculine agency, and spurred by their awareness of the likelihood that their own actions and subjectivities would be portrayed as immoral, animalistic or otherwise inadequate by others around them. As a whole, the essay stresses the importance of attending ethnographically to individuals' subjectivity.
amazonia indigeous; morality; personhood; emotions; knowledge; gender
